Five UX Steps to Apply UX Principles to Your Portfolio

Sarah Doody at UXDX Community: Five UX Steps to Apply UX Principles to Your Portfolio. Video: https://youtu.be/N4e8KdHk8jM

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The portfolio journey map

[00:00:08] Thanks for having me. And in the spirit of not making bad software, my hope is that no one watching this makes a bad portfolio. And even if you're not working on your portfolio, a lot of what we will go over today will help you in products you're working on in your role, or maybe even presentations that you need to make for research findings, or pitching an idea to your boss, your colleagues, or even potential clients. So let's dive right in here. We are going to cover the five ways that we can use these UX and product principles in our portfolio, so you can avoid having a bad portfolio, because bad portfolios will likely not lead you to having interviews. And at the end I'm going to share some resources to help you with your writing of case studies, other elements in your portfolio, and if you want, for your job search.

[00:01:14] So I am curious if you can relate to this journey map of updating your portfolio. Maybe this was you a couple of days ago, last week, last month, who knows? But what I find, I've been working in UX for over 20 years, specifically around portfolio and job search strategy for the last 10. What I find is many of you have an experience like this, where you see a job that you want to apply for, you think it's perfect, and then you realize, I am not ready to apply. And it leads you into this tornado of making progress and then second-guessing yourself, and seeing a tip on the internet and trying to implement that, and finding another tip that contradicts the other tip, until you just trash your portfolio and start it all over again. My guess is that many of you can relate to this.

What I know about you, and a little about me

[00:02:13] So, I am a researcher, and I want to share a little bit about what I know about you, and maybe you can let me know in the chat. But what I know about you is that you're probably caught in this never-ending cycle that we saw, of updating your portfolio, feeling like it's not good enough, and then starting over. Maybe you feel like your portfolio is like a full-time job or part-time job. And as a result, you don't have time for everything else that is involved in a job search. And that's why your whole job search probably feels extremely overwhelming, and maybe has led you into burnout. And just when you think you're making progress, maybe you see someone else's portfolio, you start to compare yours to theirs, and you trash yours and start all over again. And maybe you're starting to think, or you already think, that you are never going to have this portfolio that's either ready for you to apply, or that's actually going to lead you to interviews.

[00:03:26] We're going to get back to this in a second, but a little bit about me in case we haven't met yet. Like Rory said, I'm Sarah Doody. I've been working in UX research and product design strategy since the early 2000s. I've spoken at conferences, led workshops around the world. I actually created and taught General Assembly's very first 12-week UX immersive, back in 2012. Created that curriculum and taught it. And since 2012 I have been running my own consultancy. I've done research consulting, product strategy consulting. But more recently I have really reinvented my own career into this career strategist, where I'm taking all my knowledge of UX and helping you apply it to your career. And on average, people that follow what I teach end up with five figure salary increases. So that is what I'm up to these days, it's my full-time focus.

The biggest mistake: perfect, with more projects

[00:04:28] And in this last decade or so of focusing on career strategy, I've realized that the biggest mistake you guys are making in your portfolio is that you think it needs to be perfect and have more projects, and that is why it's slowing you down. You think it needs to have three to five projects, because that's what the internet tells you. You think it needs to be perfect. You think it needs to have animations and all these trends and things. You think that it needs to show everything. But based on what I'm seeing for people who are getting hired, they're getting hired sometimes with just one project in their portfolio. They're getting hired with a good enough portfolio, with a portfolio that is not a website, but a presentation. We're going to get to that in a moment. And with portfolios that don't show every single thing that they did on that redesign, or for that research project, or for whatever it was. They're getting hired because they're going deep into a couple of things, versus trying to shove everything that they did for a 12-month project into a case study, let's say.

[00:05:42] And so one of the other observations I've had, and this one's a big one, is that it's not that the work you've done isn't good enough. I think many of you believe that the projects that you want to include aren't good enough, but that's not the problem. It's that you're not UXing your portfolio. And this is a positioning problem, not a problem with the actual work you have done. So let's dive into these five UX steps that are going to help you create a portfolio that could lead to a five figure salary increase or promotion, based on what I see working for people who have followed these strategies as a part of my UX job search coaching program, which I'll tell you about later. So we're going to go into these five steps in detail, but this is where we are headed.

Step one: the three users of your portfolio

[00:06:45] Step one is that we need to understand the users of our portfolio. And there's really three users. We're making somewhat of a generalization here, but we've got those recruiters or HR people, the hiring manager, and then maybe your future peers or colleagues. These might be people that show up in the interviews once you get interview rounds, and so on. And the tricky thing is that they all need different levels of detail, because that person going through the initial three or 400 people is probably not looking for the same level of detail that that person who might sit shoulder-to-shoulder with you if you are hired at that company. So the big question is, well, how do we design a portfolio that meets all of their needs? And I'm going to show you in a moment.

[00:07:29] But what we do know is that regardless of who these people are, their time is limited, because they're hiring for a lot of roles at once. They want to know how you think, not just what you did. This is a big one, and this is what we're going to cover when we get to the part about writing case studies. And the other misconception is that they don't spend time on my portfolio. Well, they will spend more time if we give them a reason to and make it easy for them to. Side note, that comes with the writing of your case studies and how you literally design them out in your portfolio. And if we had to give them kind of a mantra, I think a good mantra for these people is, don't make me think. Don't make me jump through hoops, find a password, shuffle through Google Drive or Dropbox folders to see your work. Don't make me think. That's what we need to remember about these people.

What happens when you don't understand them

[00:08:27] And so the weird thing is, we wouldn't start working on a product without understanding our users, because if you've done that, you know it doesn't turn out very well. So why are we doing this for our portfolios? And I think when you don't think about the users of your portfolio, you end up in some of these traps. You're confused by conflicting information on the internet. You make a website because you make an assumption that they want a portfolio website, when in reality a presentation meets their needs. We'll get to that in a moment. You focus on three to five projects because that's what you're seeing people tell you on LinkedIn. But like I said, I've seen people get hired with one project, and recruiters and hiring managers, they want to see how you think, and you can communicate that in one project. They're not discounting your application because you don't have five projects. That would be really weird.

[00:09:29] What else? Another mistake that you make when you don't understand the users is, this is a big one, that you write these case studies sometimes as though they're really for internal stakeholders. By that I mean they're focusing on tons of details that the recruiter and hiring managers don't need, and it makes it hard for them to actually skim and scan your projects. So when we don't understand the users of our portfolio, we essentially have no decision filter for making decisions about the product, what to include in our portfolio, what not to include, what to write about each project, how to lay out the slides, and so on. And that's when you get into this trap of portfolio redesigns.

[00:10:12] So when you do understand the users of your portfolio, you can get out of this trap of constant redesigns, because you know your portfolio is meeting their needs, and you're not getting distracted by all of this random advice and opinions, frankly, out there that are not rooted in research around the users of your portfolio. So what we're going to go into today is very much based on my research around what they want and what I see working for people who get hired. Because Sarah is someone who got hired, and she said that after she was hired, the new boss mentioned in the interview that he was impressed to see my deck in Figma, it told a cohesive story, and it really stood out that you know what you were doing. I have another person, I didn't include their comments, but they had said in their interviews people were taking notes for their portfolios. And I just thought, wow, if we understand our users we are going to stand out, and just funnily enough, they're going to see problems in their portfolio too.

Step two: UX strategy, website or presentation?

[00:11:35] All right, let's move on to UX strategy though. So we need to make sure that we don't hold ourselves back by choosing the wrong format of a portfolio. And you've seen these posts all over, debating website, presentation, whatever. And I think when we think of having a UX strategy for our portfolio, and when we don't have that, and maybe this is you right now, you are stuck making a portfolio website and you are told it's going to be really easy and this website is just so simple to use and everything. Once you start using it and paying to use it, you realize it's a lot harder than you thought. And because of that, a lot of your time and energy is spent trying to learn this tool, this software. And what happens is that distracts you from the actual content of your portfolio. And when the content of your portfolio is not good, then what happens? It means you're underselling yourself. Your case studies are only scratching the surface, and maybe you're applying and not getting interviews. And because maybe you've decided to make a portfolio website, you are totally burnt out and everything else in your job search suffers.

Why a presentation wins

[00:13:07] But when you hit pause and really think about the UX strategy of a portfolio, I realize that presentations are actually more effective, because it allows you to create a portfolio that's not going to sell your skills short. Because when you make a presentation, you're using tools you already know how to use, whether that's Figma Slides or Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint, whatever. You can probably work a lot faster in those tools than you can trying to learn a new software. Another thing regarding the UX strategy of your portfolio is that you can easily tailor your portfolio to the jobs you're applying to when it's a presentation, because you just duplicate the presentation, make a couple of changes, and there's your new version. You can't do that with a website.

[00:14:01] And the other reason that I advocate for portfolio presentations is that when you apply and then you get an interview, you have a presentation ready to go. Versus if it's a website, what are you going to do? Are you going to rush to make a presentation, or are you going to go to that interview and pull up your website in the browser and hope the website isn't down, and talk through a project via a website browser? If you go the website route first, it means you're going to have to make a presentation anyway, most likely, because I think it's a better user experience in an interview if you're presenting a project as a presentation, not a website. Of course, there's time, there's money involved too. A lot of these portfolio website building platforms and software come with a cost.

[00:15:01] So with a portfolio strategy of my recommendation, making a presentation, you can stop wasting time with these tools, get your portfolio done faster, and therefore start applying. So if you need more proof as to why I think a website is not the greatest move and a presentation is, you could screenshot this. But obviously there's time, there's cost involved. Like we said, customizing your portfolio, kind of hard to do that on a website. And when you start with a presentation, you're ready for interviews.

Step three: content strategy

[00:15:41] All right. So after we understand our users and we have a strategy for the format of our portfolio, we can start to think about the content strategy of our portfolio. And I think of a portfolio as having three high-level sections, represented by each column. There should be a section that's about you, a section about your work, and the ending should recap a little bit about you, about why you're a fit for the company, and so on. The thing is, most of you don't focus on all of that. You maybe have one slide telling people about you, and then you have some number of projects. And to reiterate, this does not mean there must be three, I just put three on this slide.

[00:16:37] Okay, so that is one of the problems when it comes to the content strategy. Your portfolio is not doing a good job selling you, because you just have this one little slide about you and then a bunch of stuff about your case studies. And the thing is, we wouldn't start working on a content-heavy product, like, I don't know, a news website or something, or any website, but let's focus on news, without having an idea of the content strategy. Like, okay, does an article also sometimes have a video, or is there an audio version, or will there be photos, will there be photo galleries, do we need to account for ads, is there comments? We need to understand the content before we can actually design the thing. And the same applies to your portfolio. We need a content strategy of what's going to go into it.

Selling you, not just the products you worked on

[00:17:30] And so right now you probably don't have a content strategy. And as a result, when you don't have a content strategy for your portfolio, it starts to often feel like your portfolio is really just selling the products you worked on, and you're not also selling you and your skills and experience, and helping connect the dots for these busy recruiters and hiring managers about what they want. Because earlier we said their mantra kind of is, don't make me think. And so we need to make sure that our portfolios are equally talking about what we've done in case studies and communicating specific things about us, our career history, our goals, maybe even our experience in the industry that this company that we're applying to is in, so that we're connecting the dots for our very busy users.

[00:18:31] So when you don't have a really strong product strategy for your portfolio, you're going to lose the attention of these recruiters and hiring managers. Because oftentimes I find that that one or two slides about you, they're very vague, they're very generic. It just says something like, I'm a product designer who loves matching user needs with business goals to create products that people love and change the world. And that could be on 500 other people's portfolios. It tells us nothing specific about you. And so the content strategy for your portfolio needs to also focus on communicating the really specific, unique, differentiating things about you, especially things that relate to that specific company or that specific industry.

[00:19:28] But after you have a content strategy for your portfolio, and we are not just emphasizing our projects and our case studies, we're going to be able to communicate all our unique differentiators as a person. And maybe even before they get to a single case study, they're already thinking like, wow, this person could be the one. Imagine that. And you're doing this because you're connecting the dots between your skills, your experience, specific things they mentioned in the job description that you learned because you researched the company a little bit.

Tailoring which projects you include

[00:20:09] And part of content strategy also means that we might be tailoring the projects in our portfolio. So let's say you have four projects in your portfolio. It doesn't mean that every job you apply to, you're going to include all four. Maybe you apply to a job and two of them are like a perfect match, perfect examples of what they are looking for in the job. Well, let's just include those two. Let's not include all four. Because if we include the two that are really, really aligned with what they're looking for, that is going to really stand out to them, and they're not going to get distracted with the other two projects that maybe aren't as aligned with what they are looking for.

[00:20:52] So we need to make sure that our portfolio is not just heavy focus on the projects, but there is also focus on you and why you are a fit for that role. This is not saying that your portfolio must have all of these things. I've seen people get hired with just a couple of these. Not everyone has a "what sets me apart" slide, or a "why this company" slide, for example, or industry activities. But hopefully this gets you thinking about maybe where there are gaps in the content strategy of your portfolio.

Step four: UX writing

[00:21:30] I want to skip over a couple of things in the interest of time here, but okay, UX writing of your portfolio. So if you haven't realized already, we're kind of going through the UX process for how we would approach a product, except we're applying this to our portfolio. And similar to content strategy, we wouldn't start working on a product without clarity on content strategy and really involving UX writing. Because we can have the nicest designed product in the world, but if the writing is not good, people may not use it. People may get confused.

[00:22:12] And so without this UX writing strategy for your portfolio, what's going to happen is your case studies are going to go into too much detail or not enough detail. That means it's not going to give your users what they want. That also means that sometimes your portfolio kind of sounds like answers to a UX exam, meaning you spend a lot of energy and space communicating the obvious. Meaning: next, we did user research to understand the needs of the users. Well, obviously that's why we do user research. They don't want to hear that. And we're going to get to a research example of how we could include what they want to hear. But UX recruiters, hiring managers and so on, they don't need you to be defining UX terminology in your portfolio.

Talk about what went wrong

[00:23:05] Another mistake that I see when we don't have a UX writing strategy is that your portfolio doesn't discuss what went wrong, the curve balls, the problems and so on, because you are hyperfocused on communicating some perfect process. But if you've been working in UX for a while, you know that it's never a perfect process. Being wrong, failing, changing course, is just part of what we do. And so you need to make sure that you're communicating that in your case studies and not avoiding that, because that is what recruiters and hiring managers want to hear. They want to hear, how did you handle the challenge of half the team getting cut? How did you handle the challenge of usability testing saying that that new feature failed? How did you respond when the budget got cut in half, or the timeline got cut in half, or something?

[00:24:15] So when you don't have a strategy or consider the UX writing of your portfolio, your portfolio is going to come across as just cookie cutter. It's going to sound like everyone else's, and you're not going to get interviews when your portfolio sounds like everyone else, like this case study they've read a million other times. But when we do pay attention to the UX writing and we have a strategy for it, people are going to spend more than one minute, because we're giving them a reason to, because we're giving them what they want. It's going to help recruiters and hiring managers also understand how you think, versus just what you did and this almost like scrapbook of deliverables of what you did. And as a result of all of that, you are going to come across as a more desirable candidate because of how you communicated your work.

[00:25:17] Your portfolio is a project. It's another opportunity to showcase your UX and product skills. So let's not blow it by all of a sudden not applying everything we know about UX and product to our own portfolio.

Writing case studies: bad and good examples

[00:25:34] So I want to move on here. Let's get into some examples around writing case studies, and we'll get to design after. But with writing case studies, one of the challenges I see is that a lot of people just focus on what you did, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of what recruiters and hiring managers want to see. Let's look at some bad examples of what not to do. So: I conducted user research to understand the needs of travelers. That is only telling me what you did, and that is stating the obvious. Okay, we know you do research to understand their needs, but I have a lot of questions. Another bad example: next I made some wireframes. Well, great, but I don't know what I'm looking at. Another example: high-fidelity designs of the prototype. Great, thanks for telling me what I'm looking at, but I don't know what these screens are, what is going on, what I should pay attention to in these screens.

[00:26:40] So we do not want to do this. What we want to do with the UX writing of our case studies is tell a story, and we can borrow some ideas from journalism, like the five W's, which I've altered a little bit here, to help us tell the whole story. So we're going to say what we did, but we're also going to tell people, well, how did you do it? Why did you do it? Maybe who was involved, what happened, how did that inform the next step in the process, for example. And sometimes we won't answer all of these questions, but these are questions that you should be asking yourself, so you don't end up with slides in your portfolio that say, next, I did user research to understand the users, because that's useless.

[00:27:29] So let's look at some good examples here. We're going to go through a couple of slides related to a single research project. So: we wanted to understand how people are using AI to help them plan their travel, including flights and hotels, or flights, hotels and activities. Great. That's kind of like the why behind the research. What did we want to learn? Why were we doing this? Next slide. So: I created a screener and sourced 20 participants from travel groups on Facebook to conduct hour-long remote interviews using Dscout. Great. That's nice detail. It's telling us how we went about doing this research, where we found the people, how long the interviews were, and what software we used. This is what they want. This is what recruiters and hiring managers want.

[00:28:22] Next: interviews revealed travelers love AI for brainstorming but don't trust or want endless options. They wanted curated trip options, not a travel encyclopedia. What are we doing here? We are still talking about the research, but now we're talking about some of the research findings. Great. Next example: this led to a product strategy around guided decision making, curated trips versus an endless sea of AI suggestions. That's kind of like the what happened, the conclusion of the research, and then maybe after this it might go into some of the product strategy. But this is what you want to aim for. You want to avoid just, next I did research to understand the users. That's not great. And at the end of this I'm going to give you a case study template to help you do this, so we'll get to that at the end.

[00:29:20] But when you take the time to be thoughtful and intentional about how you write your case studies based on what recruiters and hiring managers want, people are going to notice. And this is an example. Liz got hired, and she said, the feedback I got from my portfolio was off the charts, seasoned designers were making notes for their portfolios. Imagine that. Imagine, number one, getting interviews, and number two, after you present a project from your portfolio, have people taking notes for their portfolio. But that is one of the examples of what people who follow these tips have happened to them, because they are able to stand out, because they just didn't tell everyone what they did. They took the time to answer all those other questions.

Step five: design strategy

[00:30:20] All right, let's get to some of the design strategy of your UX portfolio. Now, we're going to look at this through the lens of a presentation. If you opt to make a website, you can adapt these tips for your website, it's pretty easy. But let's think about designing your portfolio. So, a lot of people think of the design of their portfolio as a chance to show their personality, flex their design skills, show off trends, show off animation if they decide to make a website. No recruiter or hiring manager that I've talked to has said, I wish portfolios had more animation. The portfolio is not kind of an art project. It is a content exercise.

[00:31:20] So we don't want the design of our portfolio to distract people from the content, or inhibit them from viewing the content. And a lot of portfolios today are inhibiting people from really getting to the content and consuming that content, because the portfolios are not skimmable, they're not scannable. They're ignoring, or not even considering, basic design principles that frankly you can use to make any presentation. But we're just talking about this for the purposes of a portfolio.

[00:31:58] And so without a design strategy for your portfolio, your portfolio is going to be unreadable. And when your portfolio is unreadable, you're not going to get interviews, because people can't consume your content, and they're going to spend less than one minute on it, and they're not going to see or understand why you might be qualified for that role. So that might be why you're not getting interviews: the literal design of your portfolio. And what we want to do is make sure that the design of our portfolio is not getting in the way of the content.

[00:32:41] But after we have a design strategy for our portfolio, and we're going to see some examples in a second, after we have that design strategy, the content really gets to be the hero. It's the star. And if we want to get hired, we need the content of our portfolio to be the star. How do we do that? It's because we use design as a tool to make the content easy to skim and scan, and we make sure that the design is not getting in the way of the content. And when the design is not getting in the way of the content, people are actually engaging with your portfolio and they're skimming it. Maybe when they actually skim it, they start to read more of it. And the only way they're going to get to know more about your skills and experience is if they, number one, actually skim your portfolio, and maybe even read parts of it. But that's not going to happen unless we have a design strategy for our portfolio.

[00:33:45] So if you have a portfolio and you're applying right now and you're not getting interviews, it could be a content issue, and maybe your case studies are scratching the surface like we saw a few minutes ago. It also could be a design issue. So we want to consider that design of the portfolio, to not make the recruiters and hiring managers think, and to lay them out in a way that's easy for them to consume.

Hierarchy

[00:34:14] So I want to go to an example. This is a fictitious slide in a portfolio. Imagine it's kind of like a wireframe of a portfolio slide. So we don't have time to talk about all of the design principles for a portfolio. The one I think is the most important and can have the most impact on your portfolio is hierarchy. And it is shocking to me how many people with five years, 10, 15 or more years of experience in UX have a portfolio that does not have hierarchy. It's like hierarchy is such a simple to execute thing, but so many times it's lost.

[00:34:56] And so we want to talk about hierarchy. Now, this slide has no hierarchy. And why is that? Because all the text is basically the same size, and there's this little visual and some text in a similar size over there. So none of the text is really standing out, because it's all the same size. This slide has hierarchy. And how is that hierarchy created? It's because we're using different font sizes and making some of the text a little bolder, to help it stand out.

[00:35:38] And so just to make my point in case it's not obvious, left has no hierarchy, right has hierarchy, because on the right we have that one sentence at the top in a bigger font size, so it is jumping out. And when something has hierarchy, your eye knows what to focus on, versus with no hierarchy your eye is just like, big, lots of text, don't know where to focus. But with this, your eye is naturally drawn to the top. That is the power of hierarchy, and a lot of portfolios are missing that.

Headline, body, background

[00:36:14] So in addition to hierarchy, we want to look at these three elements that make a really good layout for a slide for your portfolio, or frankly any presentation. If you've been paying attention, you know I've kind of been doing this throughout this entire presentation. So let's look at these three elements. Any presentation, but especially your portfolio, needs a headline at the top of the page. Now this is different, because a lot of you at the top of your pages have more like a title, and it just says like "user research" in a giant font, or, I don't know, "design system" or something. That's kind of not great for the users of our portfolio. It's more effective to have a headline, meaning a one sentence, maybe two sentence summary of what that slide is about, so that if someone went through your portfolio and only read the headlines, they would get the gist of what you did. So every slide needs a headline, the most important thing, the one thing we want them to know.

[00:37:27] Next, on a slide we need some body, which is essentially information that is supporting that headline. We're going to see examples of this in a second, but that is going to support whatever that headline was, so that if they read the headline they're now getting a little bit more detail about this. And maybe there is a visual too, or something like that. And then the third element is really background information. This is more for that person who is really interested in this and they read all the words, and now this is telling them more details about whatever this slide is about.

[00:38:10] So if you have studied journalism at all, this might seem familiar, and it is derived from the idea of the inverted pyramid, where every news story, every interview, there's always a headline, because journalists and news websites and everything know a lot of people are just reading the headlines. But if they can get you to read the headline and click in, then you're going to provide them with some body information about the story. And then if someone is really interested, you're going to provide more background about whatever this story is about. Same with your portfolio. We need a headline, a body and a background.

[00:38:52] Now, this is not to say that every single slide is always going to have background information, is always going to have all three of these. Sometimes it won't, but at minimum there should always be a headline. Now I just want to caveat this, because some people assume that I mean every slide in your portfolio is literally going to be laid out like this, with two columns and a headline that goes all the way across. No, we're focusing on the elements, not the literal layout. But as you can see here, this is my portfolio template, and it's zoomed out so we can only see the little thumbnails. But even at the thumbnail level, you can see every slide has a headline. And not all the slides are laid out the same, but every slide has a headline. And that is one of the number one takeaways for today: let's make sure our portfolio slides have headlines.

The same slide, made readable

[00:39:51] So let's look at an example. Imagine this is a slide from a portfolio. So: next I made some wireframes. We all know why that's not good. And then we have this visual. So there is a headline. The words of the headline are kind of useless because it's stating the obvious. And the visual, I mean, we don't know what we're looking at. Who knows? It looks like a little bit of a complicated wireframe there. We don't know what part of it we should be paying attention to.

[00:40:23] So one idea, we're going to do this progressively with two examples here. One idea is to at least improve the text. So explain to people the problem, which was, this was some type of customer dashboard, because we gave the page a label in the top right. And then we're explaining that navigating between the customers used to involve going back and forth between two pages, like the list page and the detail page. And adding this left column navigation made it possible for people to see everything on one page, because they could use this left, hopefully you can see my mouse, I'll turn on my special thing, this left column was kind of part of the solution. But still it's hard to know what to look at, because that's kind of complicated.

[00:41:16] So instead, thinking about the layout of our portfolio, what if we did something like this? So we have a clear headline, navigating between customers. Obviously then we have some body information: adding a left customer navigation in the dashboard allowed account managers to see everything on one screen. Great. Then we have some more details, and we adjusted that visual to zoom in to that left navigation, because that's what this slide is about. And now we can actually see it. And for the person that's really interested in this now, they know exactly what parts of that left navigation to pay attention to, and why we added the search and why we did these other things, because we told them.

[00:42:08] So see the difference between this versus this. This one, I guess this one is the worst. But the thing is, a lot of your portfolios are looking like this. And the content, the words, are not great. And even if you did good work, we can't see the details of the work, because we don't know what to look at in the wireframe, or you haven't literally zoomed into parts that help us understand the benefit of the solutions you created. And I know in UX, oftentimes presenting visuals is difficult. So maybe it's a long web page or a wide journey map or something. This idea of just zooming into stuff, it's not rocket science, it's just thinking of our user. So this is something to keep in mind, but also those three elements of having a headline on every slide, some type of body, and background information.

Recap

[00:43:15] And what is this doing? It's meeting the needs of our users. So today we went over understanding the three users, and how we need to design for them. And side note, that layout that we went through, and thinking about a headline, a body and some background, that is how we can meet the various levels of detail that all of them are looking for. Because maybe that recruiter going through 300 applications, maybe they're just quickly skimming through your portfolio, maybe reading the headline. But then that person that's going to interview you, who might be a peer or something, they might read the headline and the body and the background. They're going to go a lot deeper than that person that's just doing the initial, do we interview them or not.

[00:44:12] So one misconception I see is that you think you need to have multiple portfolios, one for when you apply, one for this, one for that. That's a lot of wasted time and energy. Why don't we just create a portfolio that actually can meet the needs of all the people, and we do that through being thoughtful about the writing and the design. But you can write the best case studies, and if you ignore the design no one's going to read them, because it won't have hierarchy and no one will read it.

[00:44:47] Okay, so we learned about the users of our portfolio. We learned about the UX strategy, specifically the format of the portfolio and the benefits of a presentation over a website. We learned about the content strategy, and how it's really important to not just have your projects but also some sections that are helping to connect the dots between you and your experience and what they are looking for, unique differentiators so you don't sound like every other person. And we talked about the UX writing, like having case studies that don't just talk about what, but how, who, why, what happened, and so on. And we talked about this design strategy, to make our slides readable so that people don't open up our portfolio and leave 10 seconds later. Because we need to make sure that we have a headline on every slide, to hopefully draw them in and maybe read more. But if they only read the headline, they're going to get the gist of what we're trying to communicate on that slide.

Resources

[00:45:52] So I want to wrap up here, but I'm going to go back to this. I'm guessing many of you felt like this when you came into this, and my hope is that next time you go to work on your portfolio, this will not be your experience, that you will not end up trashing it once or three or four or six times. You have portfolio version one, version two, version 17. We want to get rid of that because it's wasting time.

[00:46:24] And this is really important, because getting hired in UX, or promoted, it's not just about having an awesome portfolio. It's also about everything else that is involved in getting hired. We don't have time to go into all of this. Your portfolio is just one piece. It's also about resume, LinkedIn, your network, having a career roadmap, which is something we can maybe talk about another day, knowing how to sell yourself as a candidate. But I think a lot of you are stuck right now because you are only focusing on your portfolio, because you're in this what I call cycle of sabotage, or someone the other day said maybe I should call it the cycle of self sabotage.

[00:47:12] But I want to get into the resources I have for you, because what you don't need is another portfolio redesign. I really believe that you need a job search operating system, and that is what I do inside Career Strategy Lab, which is my company. I created it, and it's really truly that, a job search operating system to help you navigate everything in your job search, including your portfolio, so that you can get clear on your narrative, your clear career story, and then communicate that across your resume, LinkedIn, portfolio and so on, in a consistent way that is not underselling your skills and experience.

[00:47:54] People who follow what I teach in this program get five figure salary increases on average. I have a little Slack bot I set up that tells me their before and after salaries, and it is average five figures. This program is for people in all parts of UX. This is not just design. I've had information architects, project managers, product managers, web designers and so on. It's for people around the world. I've had people get hired in all these countries and more, and hired at all of these companies and more that just could not fit on this slide.

[00:48:33] So I want to give you some resources here, and if you're interested, more information about that program. If you scan this QR code, it's going to take you to a Google doc I created for you, and that has a link to a UX case study template that you can use. It also has access to a podcast playlist of portfolio episodes, and also details about this Career Strategy Lab program that I run. So if you want to get that, just go to that QR code. It's also going to link you to my YouTube channel, my LinkedIn, other places where you can find me. But if you want to dive deeper into portfolio, or if you're like, I need help with more than my portfolio, you can find resources all there. So I want to turn it back over to Rory and see if we can answer a few questions in the next five minutes or so.

Q&A

[00:49:31] Rory: Excellent, thank you very much, Sarah. That was really useful, and I think a lot of great advice out there for some people if you're particularly in the job hunt right now. So hopefully that's useful to everybody out there. Just a reminder, you can write your questions in on whichever platform you're watching this on, and I'll put those questions through to Sarah. We've had one question already, so I'll jump in with that one. From Priya, and Priya's asking: I understand that these are UX steps more suited for the positions of product designers, UX designers. Do you have any similar advice for brand designer or brand strategist portfolio?

[00:50:10] Sarah: I would say the same applies. The only difference, it will be the content in there. So maybe you developed a logo or a brand guide or something else. They still want to hear exactly what we went through. They still want to know not just what you did, but why did you do it? How did you do that? Who was involved? What happened? What was the impact? So I'm asked this question a lot. Okay, this is cool, but how does this process change if I'm a UX researcher or a UX writer or a whatever? And my answer is always, it's the same. It's just that the content of your portfolio will be different.

[00:50:55] Rory: Excellent, great advice. And it kind of leans into what I've been hearing a lot, and I know maybe it's just the trend of the day, but it's all about taste. I'm hearing taste come up a lot, of how can you show in your portfolio your product taste. Because I guess where that's coming from, just for some context, I'm seeing it in the AI space, that AI can do some designs but not very well right now. So do you have any advice for people on how they can try to get that across? I guess it's less about the process that they follow, which you talked quite in detail about, and more about how to show their taste.

[00:51:38] Sarah: Yeah, to be honest I think it kind of comes through in your portfolio. It may come through a little bit in the actual projects that you've worked on, if you worked on interface or more high-fidelity design work and things like that. But your portfolio is also a chance to demonstrate your design taste, if you will. And I cannot reiterate enough how many portfolios I see from people who say they are a product designer with 20 years of experience, and I open the portfolio and I'm like, everything is the same font size, there's no white space, there's no hierarchy, it feels cramped, it's hard to consume. And so I think that happens because it's kind of like startup founders that are too close to their product and they just can't see their own mistakes.

[00:52:39] Sarah: But I think showing your taste, there's a balance there too, because we don't want the design of your portfolio to distract from the content. I would say too, your portfolio might seem boring design-wise to you, but in order to meet the needs of your users, maybe we don't need to have portfolios that are just swimming in animation and full of trendy design stuff.

[00:53:15] Rory: Yeah, and I agree actually. I think taste doesn't necessarily mean going to that extreme of everything animated. Sometimes subtle is showing more sense of taste.

[00:53:27] Sarah: Yeah, exactly.

[00:53:30] Rory: Another question that comes up frequently is, when looking at a portfolio or an application for somebody, it looks great because the case study is there, but it's obvious that there's a team. And what's really difficult is understanding, okay, so you're saying that you were part of that team, but how much of it is you, and how much would you be able to replicate in my company, is kind of a question that somebody is trying to answer.

[00:53:55] Sarah: Yeah. So for projects that you worked on with the team, I think early in that case study in the portfolio it can be helpful to have a slide about the team, just to kind of set the stage of who was involved, who were the other players. It could also talk about the stakeholders even, give us a sense of who the team was. And then you can, in the actual slides of the portfolio, be very mindful about focusing on, I did this, I did that. And then if you are a designer and you worked on something with another designer, I think you should acknowledge, together we did XYZ. So I think it's just a balance of setting the stage of who all was involved, and just being very clear, like you said, about what did you work on versus someone else.

[00:54:54] Rory: Okay. And I guess the question that comes up a lot is, how do you even get to the interview stage, I guess, where you can present this? Any kind of pre-tips that you can give?

[00:55:06] Sarah: Yeah. I wish I had a magic answer here, and we don't know, every recruiter or hiring manager probably has a different approach when it comes to vetting candidates. So some might look at the portfolio and not look at a resume. Some might look at resume, portfolio and LinkedIn. We don't know, it's impossible. Which is why I'm a huge advocate of, we need to not fall into the trap of putting all our time into just our portfolio, because then if our resume or LinkedIn suffers, they may never make it to our portfolio, because we rushed our resume, or we didn't update it or something like that.

[00:55:50] Sarah: And so I think to get those interviews, it's really about giving the same level of detail and attention that we just saw for portfolios, and also applying it to your resume and your LinkedIn. So they're, number one, designed for the user, and number two, so they're telling a consistent story about you, so that regardless of which asset they look at first, so to speak, they're getting a consistent understanding of you. But I can't tell you the number of times people tell me they've applied to like 200 jobs and not had interviews, and I go to their LinkedIn and it's barely filled in, or it obviously hasn't been updated in years, and their resume is like one page, and I am not a fan of one-page resumes. Story for another day. And so yeah, it's about giving the same attention and detail, like we did today, to everything.

[00:56:52] Rory: Yeah, it's great advice, because I've been on the receiving end of some applications, and yeah, you can tell that they're just clicking a button versus putting any kind of effort in. So it's twofold. You obviously want to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward, but it is challenging for the person who's doing 200 applications.